Reviews for Pentaho Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL

1. Great book for a comprehensive application suite

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, February 12th, 2010

   This is a tremendous book to get an insight into the workings of the Pentaho application behemoth.
   
   During my java development, I've found the need to use the excellent Pentaho Data Integration aka Kettle to transform data with great flexibility.
   
   I bought this book to get a handle on the Pentaho Report Designer and the Pentaho BI server setup, not thinking I would need to touch much of the other stuff.
   After a few weeks of getting to grips with the Report Designer, the requirements changed, we are now looking at using Pentaho Analysis Reports/Mondrian. Guess what, it's pretty much covered all you need to know to get started.
   The Pentaho Analysis Reports will blow people away!
   And that couple of chapters on data warehousing that I thought I didn't need, well I'm ploughing through that now!
   
   The only section I have not properly touched yet is Data Mining but once you start to gain the knowledge imparted here, it's only a matter of time ...
   
   If you're intending to check Pentaho out, then JUST GET THIS BOOK!

2. A good book - worth the money

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, January 12th, 2010

   I woudl not say this is a "great" book. To me it is very good but not a seminal work on BI. It is though I would say an essential purchase if you want to know anything about Pentaho and for that reason I would say buy it. The author clearly knows their stuff about BI and Pentaho in particular. Nice reference guide and nice initiation into Pentaho.

3. It's not just a great Pentaho book, it's an awesome reference for building BI applications.

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, September 12th, 2009

   Jos and Roland have done a great job explaining the tools and technology of the Pentaho BI Platform in the context of building real world Business Intelligence applications. They have taken some very complicated and technical concepts and presented them in an easy to follow case study. The case study they chose is simple to understand yet filled with the same kinds of real world complexities that make BI applications difficult to deliver.
   
   The "Getting Started with Pentaho" section has all the information and documentation you wish you could find neatly arranged on the Pentaho community site. They do an excellent job explaining the entire Pentaho application stack from collecting data to presenting information. The book could have stopped here, being the Pentaho missing manual, and still have been worth buying.
   
   The next section, "Dimensional Modeling and Data Warehouse Design" is an very good introduction/refresher on hows and whys of building data warehouses, data marts and OLAP cubes. Again they have taken a subject that is broad and complex and presented it in a way that is easy to understand and apply. Where appropriate, they refer the reader to other resources available for more in-depth coverage of specific topics.
   
   A data warehouse is useless until you can reliably get good, complete and accurate data into it. The section on "ETL and Data Integration" is another section that could easily stand on it's own. After an introduction to ETL and Pentaho Data Integration, they show how to populate the database used for the case study including populating time dimensions. Other real world topics touched upon include; change data capture, data validation, data cleansing and issues with generating dimension tables.
   
   The last section covers transforming data into information via metadata, reporting, analysis services, data mining and dashboards. Each topic is covered by an introduction, explanation of the tools available and examples using data from the case study.
   
   I like the way Roland and Jos combine general BI knowledge with tutorials on the Pentaho applications and tie it all together with an interesting case study giving you a chance to stop and play as you follow along. I also enjoyed the many side notes with tidbits of history and pointers to other resources. Overall I found this book both informative and enjoyable.
   
   I'm a fifteen year veteran of building BI software, one of the original Pentaho developers and am currently the Pentaho community guy. I'm not affiliated with Jos, Roland or Wiley and receive no benefit from this book beyond the satisfaction of having Pentaho software be so well represented.
   
   Doug Moran
   Pentaho